MINIX

MINIX (from Mini and Unix) is a free Unix-based operating system designed by Andrew Tanenbaum in 1987.[1] MINIX was the very first UNIX-like operating system ported to personal computers, predating Linux. Linus Torvalds was an early enthusiast of MINIX and it inspired him to design Linux.[2] Its latest stable release is 3.2.0 and developer snapshot is 3.2.1.[3] Although originally designed in the university setting as a hobby of Tanenbaum, it was later released as open source and is now developed by contributors.[4] A key difference between MINIX and Linux, is the fact that MINIX uses a microkernel, instead of a monolithic kernel, so that in theory, MINIX would be more portable than Linux, across different processor architectures.